bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

do towns have relevant stuff in common with other towns anyway? besides costa and tk maxx, and so as helpfully to discover the magic beans to ensure their general redevelopment without simply making their housing less affordable lol. on the whole they are going to need different strategies, and most of these will likely rile the older inhabitants and deepen the gulf

i grew up in just outside shrewsbury but i doubt i could connect to any of the fallen red wall as a result, or even oswestry tbh

it were all teashops when i were lad but since they built the park-and-ride and made it pedestrian-only it's mostly empty shop fronts bcz everyone drives to telford instead

probably not, no, or when they do there are strange affinities. the town where keir starmer grew up, which also happens to be the town where I grew up, is split into two - the older part, which I lived in, about a mile from the main part, which grew up round the newly built station for london commuters.

there were no pubs in the main part to ensure the navvies didn't get drunk. there were and indeed still are four pubs in the much smaller old village, within about 100 metres of each other.

pevsner described the older part as 'strangely grim, like a northern industrial village'.

Starmer would’ve been at school with Norman Cook and Ray Mears

tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty you're listening to the boy from a town on the border between surrey and kent

All this positing himself as something he - the Kier Starmer project clearly isn't - is just symptomatic of everything that is wrong with his ilk. Corbyn didn't hide that he was terminally middle class and dull and nobody cared a jot.

Starmer would’ve been at school with Norman Cook and Ray Mears

ray meanwhile just hangs out in the woods setting fire to hedgehogs and eating bark

Yrah but RLB was there when MES was paving the way for Northside!

ray meanwhile just hangs out in the woods setting fire to hedgehogs and eating bark

― Death to (NickB), Wednesday, 8 January 2020 19:35 bookmarkflaglink

I'm imagining this is Ray Mears' referring to himself in the third person in response to a question about his Labour leadership working class bona fides.

Haha!

all the candidates -- and everyone they went to school with -- post to ilx this is canon

if you ever you get a Housemartin caught in your garden netting - always best to batter it to death with a baseball bat - even if it isn't the worst one - aka the one that Kier Starmer went to school with.

"not to be confused with stan collymore"

ok this was a rollercoaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Collymore#Personal_life

if you ever you get a Housemartin caught in your garden netting - always best to batter it to death with a baseball bat - even if it isn't the worst one - aka the one that Kier Starmer went to school with.

Worse than the homicial axe-wielding maniac/arsonist?

Honours

Individual

Premier League Player of the Month: January 1996[46]

... and that's it? No wonder he's depressed.

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almost I reckon! I once told my younger brother, back in the 90's, that he was a clueless dickhead for saying Norman Cook was "best hip-hop producer in the UK"

bloody hell, he played for Bradford City - surely that counts as an honour!

Starmer’s membership of the Housemartins ended in acrimony after they refused to title their debut album ‘A Town On The Kent And Surrey Border 0, Hull 4’

lol!

I just had a dream that Len McCluskey is backing big Bazza Gardiner for Labour leadership, need to stop sniffing that paint thinner.

I'm actually disappointed that he didn't refer to himself as Sir Keir Starmer.

This "grew up in a town" thing is going to get more and more pronounced as every single politician and media figure outdoes themselves to see who can out-John Harris the man himself. They'll be designing WW2 board games with Liam Gallagher as Churchill before the year's out.

Where did he grow up? Reigate?

also shrewsbury iirc the only town

the town of Lewisham for me guvnor

Pity he didn't grow up about 3 miles north west in Mogador.

centreforhamlets.org

Wonder if Norman Cook ever talks about his time spent with axe-wielding maniac/arsonist, Ray Mears

Where did he grow up? Reigate?

Oh I went there once! University mate of mine was doing some amdram. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof so it was. Now he does work making Africa more socially liberal or something

He's basically Keir Starmer gone international, come to think of it

@stoya come to wig wig – the centreforhamlets revolution is happening

https://i.imgur.com/Q94ordy.jpg

went to school in reigate. grew up in a place called oxted.

Oh that's no use, that's nowhere near Mogador. However Titsey is a hop, skip and a jump away.

they sure don't make grammar school townies like Harold of Cowlersley any more. Does anyone know if that Ben Pimlott biography on him is worth reading?

I read it years ago. Anything with stories about George Brown in it is worth reading tbh.

"old market town" > "town"

(I throw stuff at Paul from Flog It for various reasons, but him declaring they're in "X, *an old market town*" surely is top of that list for the "ahh memories, English charm 'n all" hives it gives me)

xp

I fancied that Pimlott book as a diversion from this depressing leadership contest and some escapist nostalgia. Lool there is a foreword by Peter Hennessy from 2016 in the edition I got that spends quite a few paragraphs slating the fuck out of Corbyn. The horseracing analogy he uses is that Harold was a Grand National winner and Corbz is a plodding camel yet to win a point-to-point race. Oh dear, there is no escape!

Deputy leader nominations (there’s a leader page too but cbf to link)

https://labour.org.uk/people/leadership-2020-nominations/deputy-leadership-2020/

gtfo with those 20 people that backed the pickled egghead, wtf!

I think Burgon should give up those compromising pics of Diane he has for the good of the party.

I mean lots of reasonable MPs are backing Burgon, but this is misplaced loyalty at its worst.

Sadly these type of snide comments are now commonplace. The BBC are deaf to complaint or criticism and will doubtless defend this as legitimate commentary. It isn’t and should have no place in the BBC. pic.twitter.com/ImvXvEWeV3

— Andy McDonald MP (@AndyMcDonaldMP) January 8, 2020

amused that seemingly you can nominate yourself but keen strategist Richard Burgon has decided not to

i could imagine some awkwardness about voting for yourself, but it isn't much of a big deal if most of the other candidates are doing it. And it isn't like he comes across as mr self-deprecation and modesty at his best.

Richard Burgon has probably calculated that the Richard Burgon endorsement is a poisoned chalice and decided the Richard Burgon campaign is better off without it. Burgonomics.

Burgon was elected as MP for Leeds East at the 2015 general election.He was described by The Observer as one of "the stars of the [2015] intake"

Observer as prescient and otm as ever. Don't talk to him about sophistication .. he's from Leeds. Although he could up his townie cred by talking about when he went to Harrogate 6th form college.
Harrogate is so posh.. I once went there for a pre-season friendly and got chatting to a posh as fuck BBC producer/novelist in the pub, he gave me an inscribed copy of his not very good crime novel which got binned at some point!

Does he just carry copies of his novel around at Huddersfield games just in case of instances like this?

"News of Bazzmentum has not reached these shores, back to you in the studio, Chris"

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no this was an away trip to Harrogate. I used to be possessed enough to travel to pre-season friendlies.